Directed by Bruno Mattei
Today is the glorious start of our new week, Rat Week! I didn’t know too much going into this one except that its director is Bruno Mattei, which might mean something to you, but only if you’re as big of a schlock movie nerd as I am. Mattei was responsible for many exploitation movies like Robowar and Women’s Prison Massacre, movies that are famous for being close to a fever dream, so I was both hopeful and fearful about what he’d do with rats and the terrifying night they now reside in.
Like many Italian exploitation movies, our story begins in the post-apocalypse where a ragtag group of bizarrely dressed survivors enter a seemingly abandoned city. Disembarking from their impressive collection of motorcycles and tank-like vehicles, the group investigates a run-down bar, finding an astonishing set up of food, drink, and scientific equipment. What they also find there is rats, lots and lots of rats. As the number and boldness of the rats increases, the group is forced to make tough decisions about how they can protect their new home, and themselves, from the dangerous beasts.
What shocked me about Rats: Night of Terror was just how coherent and logical most of the plot seems to be. Going into this, I was expecting some Bruno Mattei weirdness, but the story is a fairly straightforward character drama about a group trying to survive in this city while a horde of rats is determined to make them dinner. There were definitely still logical leaps here and there, but nothing that completely destroyed the movie, and the tension in the situation escalated steadily. You could almost take the movie seriously…if not for the rats.
You see, the big problem with this movie is that even though they managed to get hordes of real rats to appear, they did not get hordes of trained rats. These rats are sitting around on tables and such, completely unbothered, and characters react to them in over the top expressions of terror, all while these rats are literally doing nothing except sitting there. It’s even worse when the rats start gathering in ‘attack’ hordes, because you can clearly see that the swarm of rats is eating pellets of rat food on the ground while paying no attention to any of the people on set. There’s one glorious sequence when a man is trying to “defend his group from a swarm of rats” and he has to run up to the mass of rats (who are of course nowhere near him or his group) and swing a torch at them all while he’s screaming “Oh my god, they’re coming right for us!” This is 100% the peak of the entire movie.
Besides that, the strangest thing about Rats: Night of Terror is how competent most of it seems to be. The acting is about as good as it was ever going to be for a post apocalyptic Italian movie from the 1980s, the cinematography is decent, as is the design of the city they’re all trapped inside. This all puts the movie into kind of a weird spot because it’s not bad enough to be ‘so bad it’s good’ but it also isn’t good enough to be the kind of movie I’d recommend to watch on its own, kind of a weird middle ground. While this might not warrant a sit down viewing, it would probably be good for a Halloween party, a nice low stakes movie that you can dip in and out of without feeling too bad about missing every second, especially because there are some pretty effective sequences, like an infamous scene involving a broken sleeping bag.
Not the best, not the worst, but give it a try if it sounds interesting.